Building a Habitat - Iguana

As you may know, The Drawing Zoo is not a traditional animal care model. The animals are not imported, traded, or bred by The Drawing Zoo, rather they come from homes that can longer provide care. So the animals all live with the business's founders, Kerri and myself. The Drawing Zoo is more than a job-it's a lifestyle!

Part of caring for all these amazing animals is providing them with enriched lives and meeting all of their specific and absolute needs. To satisfy a lot of customer curiosity, this is a post regarding the steps taking to provide Pierce the Iguana a proper home.

What makes a proper iguana home? We did a lot of research and found the best sources of information were from Green Iguana Society, Green Iguana: The Ultimate Owner's Manual by James W. Hatfield III, and our exotic pet/wildlife rehab veterinarian.

Pierce lives with me and my boyfriend in our house. Adam, the boyfriend is extremely helpful.
Step 1: Find the space. We chose to renovated my office closet as Pierce's indoor cage. It is 7 ft tall, 7 ft long and 3 ft deep.

Step 2: Clean the space.

Step 3: Replace carpet with rubber floor. Iguana's need high humidity and a soaking area. We needed to prevent mold. 

Since we aren't awesomely handy, we cut the carpet out of the closet and draped it on the rubber to trace. Why risk measuring wrong?
After laying in the rubber floor, we also caulked the seams. Again, mold prevention!

Step 4: Prime and paint. Again, iguanas need a high humidity environment. To prevent mold, we invested in mold-prevention bathroom paint and primer from Lowe's.

And what kind of artist would I be if I didn't get creative? Instead of a traditional rainforest image, I chose to do Emerald City so Pierce could be "The Wonderful Lizard of Oz".

Step 5: Add screen doors. Since I'm not too handy, we enlisted the help of a friend to cut large holes out of the original sliding doors. We shopped around for new doors but nothing fit the odd-ball dimensions of our 1970's closet!
After the holes were cut, I stapled construction mesh to the inside. This provides proper ventilation, climbing opportunities, and we can see him!

Step 6: Add UVB bulbs and heat bulbs. This was Adam all the way. He is good with all things electric. He installed a lighting system which runs on a timer and can be controlled by our phones. This was Pierce gets exactly 12 hrs of UVB light a day. The heat bulb is on 24 hrs to give Pierce a hot spot of 90 degrees.

Step 7: Add shelves and ladders. These frequently get switched to different branch arrangements. Add soaking pan, food dish, thermometers and foam floor. I bought a big foam pad to catch him if he falls.

 

All Done! Earlier, I specified that this is Pierce's indoor cage. Even though we put a lot of time, money and labor into this cage, nothing beats fresh air, sunshine and sweltering humidity. So in the summer, Pierce spends most of his time in his outdoor cage. It's a little smaller than his indoor cage but he LOVES it out there. The cage is 5 ft tall, 3 ft long and 3ft deep. It was donated by our awesome veterinarian. We can examine this cage better in another post!

I hope that this post was helped readers understand the time, effort and financial commitment that goes into an exotic pet like an Iguana. I also hope you enjoyed seeing the step by step documentation of our experience. Subscribe to this blog to see more about the animals, classes and artwork! 

-Brittany Roger